Never Let 'Em See
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Seeley Booth is exceptionally tough, and always has been. He doesn't give up and he doesn't give in. In this oneshot, Booth looks back on how he learned to be so tough, and the one person who's seen him when he's at his most vulnerable.


**Never Let 'Em See**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rated:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Hart Hanson owns Bones. But people like me who play in his sandbox give you all those little moments that Hart and friends leave out. In this case, insight into Booth's experience under torture and what's happening behind the veil of his resolve.

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**A/N:** _Booth has a very particular facial expression we have seen a few times in the show—during the dressing down he got from Kirby in "Judas on a Pole," during the torture scene towards the end of "Killer in the Concrete" and more recently, during the B&B argument at the construction site in "Partners in the Divorce"—when his expression goes more or less blank, his eyes fix straight ahead and his jaw gets rigid as a veil of emotionless resolve descends over his face. This story is inspired by that facial expression and the history behind it._

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_Never let 'em see ya sweat._

That's the old saying, but the truth is, if you've ever really been in the shit like I have—beaten, tortured, that kind of thing—then you know that sweating is the one thing you do let 'em see. What you never let 'em see is a breakdown, where your will fractures and you fall apart. You never let 'em see that. That's what they want, and you never want to give 'em the satisfaction of seeing you break, not even a little bit, because then—well, because then they'll think they've broken you, and you're done for.

When I was a Ranger, I had to take a SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) course in which we were taught various techniques for how to resist torture—how to hold up under the most brutal treatment imaginable and protect the valuable intelligence that each of us carried in our minds. I remember sitting there in the course listening to the instructor talk, and I saw my buddy and fellow Ranger Hank Luttrell (who I later served with in Kosovo) turn to me with a knowing look and a shrug. He knew what none of the other guys in the course knew—that I'd actually been a POW, and that the kind of stuff the instructor was talking about was shit I'd been through, personally.

It was in 1991, in Iraq, a few days after the mission when my spotter, Corporal Parker, was killed. The 101st sent a company-sized element to Samawah, and in the course of a sweep through a block of mud-brick buildings along an irrigation canal, half of my platoon got pinned down in an alleyway behind a mosque. We'd already lost two guys to sniper fire by the time we figured out where the shots were coming from. I went with my new spotter, Matthews, and two other men to clear an Iraqi sniper from the two-story building where he'd set up shop. No sooner had we taken out the sniper and made our way back down to the ground floor and into the courtyard behind the building when we heard a burst of rifle fire on the other side of the courtyard. The two men who were our backup had gone down, and the two of us were looking at the business end of six Iraqi AK-47s. Matthews and I knew we were in deep trouble the second we set foot in that courtyard. We fought 'em as best we could—especially considering we only had my sniper rifle, his M-16, two M9 9mm pistols and four hand grenades between us—but in the end, we didn't stand a chance.

The next thing I knew, I woke up on a concrete floor in a cold, dark four foot by six foot cell. The only light was that which shone through a tiny window in the door, maybe six inches by six inches. I had no idea where I was—what town or city—or who was holding me. I had no idea what day it was, or what time it was. The cell smelled like piss and stale sweat, but I wasn't sure if it was mine or somebody else's. All I knew was my whole body hurt. My jaw was sore. My head throbbed. My arms felt tight. Everything fucking hurt. I felt a burning sensation in the middle of my back and I remembered a grenade rolling past us during the firefight in the courtyard, and me kicking it away and tackling Matthews to the ground as it went off. I was a fucking mess. Even breathing hurt. At one point, I tried to roll over and the pain pierced me like a spear and that was when I figured I had a broken rib. It really did feel like I'd been run over by a freight train. I groaned and drew my legs up as I tried to sit up, and that's when I felt it. _My feet. _Just trying to slide my feet across the concrete floor as I moved my legs, they hurt so bad I damn near passed out. I looked down and saw them—cut, bruised and bloody all along the arch of each foot, and my toes looked like big red grapes, the way the skin was swollen tight as a drum and sort of a purplish color.

I gave up trying to move and just curled into a fetal position. I lay there for God only knows how long. When the cell door finally opened, the light from the hall outside blinded me, and I then remembered being in another room, a bigger one with a bright light shining in my face as I sat there tied to a chair while being interrogated by an Iraqi officer whose face I couldn't quite see. I remembered him yelling at me in vaguely British-accented English and demanding that I tell him what I knew about the American battle plan. He hit me, again and again, first with the back of his hand, then with his fist, and later with the grip of a Tokarev pistol, but I refused to tell him anything.

"_You think you're some kind of tough guy?" _he asked me as he reared his arm back for another blow. _"I'll show you—"_

I sat there and stared straight forward, my jaw held firm as I just tried to focus on breathing, taking one breath after the other. He wailed on me with the butt of his pistol and I heard my tooth crack. (So in addition to needing treatment at Landstuhl for my busted-up feet and the shrapnel in my back, four days drinking contaminated well-water meant that the tooth that the Iraqis broke got infected and so the Army dentists gave me root canal. And people wonder why I hate going to the dentist.) Little did that Republican Guard officer—a lieutenant colonel, judging by the eagle and single star on his dark green shoulder board insignia—know, but I'd been getting the tar beat out of me since I was in elementary school.

That's one thing I could do, and do pretty well—take a beating.

"_You think you're some kind of tough guy?" _my dad would ask me as I stepped in front of Jared and pushed my baby brother aside so that he could run out the front door and down the street to the neighborhood park where he'd hide when Dad got into one of his drunken rages. _"Huh, Seeley? You think you're a tough guy? Boy, you don't know anything about what it means to be a man..."_

I swore I wasn't going to let my dad see me break. I was going to show him I was more of a man than he was. And I never let him break me. He tried, but I wouldn't let him break me.

That West Virginia mobster, Melvin Gallagher, thought he could break me, too.

He wanted me to tell him if Kennedy was alive or dead, but I refused. He hit me, too, again and again, but I wouldn't let him see me waver even a bit. I just kept looking straight ahead, the way I did in Iraq, and the way I used to when Dad would hit me. I just stared, not looking in his eye or at anything in particular, but just let everything in front of me kind of blur as I focused all of my attention on the way my ribcage expanded as I breathed in and the way it contracted as I exhaled. I didn't even look at his fist, or at Lightner, that creepy lawyer of his with his snooty British accent. Even when Gallagher leaned over and put his chubby, goateed face right in front of mine, close enough that I could smell his nasty breath, I refused to meet his eyes. _Fuck him, _I told myself. _Not gonna let him see me break. _I didn't flinch when they told me they'd have to kill me.

"_How would you like to kill him?" _Lightner asked his boss.

"_First," _Gallagher said,_ "I gotta know for sure if Kennedy's dead or alive."_

He kept hitting me, but I wouldn't break. I gritted my teeth and silently swore that could do whatever he wanted to with me, but I wasn't going to give him what he wanted. Without turning my gaze away from the point in the distance I'd chosen to stare at—the back of the tire of the landing gear of the airplane behind him—I flashed my eyebrows and muttered, _"Good luck with that one, big dog."_

I heard Gallagher chuckle and snicker, _"Big dog."_

I saw Lighter move out of the corner of my eye. _"Oh, I suppose we could do that thing that McKenna used to do. But I'd need a blow torch and a sharpened screwdriver."_

"_Just tell us,_" Gallagher said.

I turned my head and growled, _"Woof."_

I watched Lightner fire up that blowtorch and apply the flame to the shaft of the screwdriver I'd heard him sharpening earlier. I remember thinking, _This is gonna fucking hurt, _but still, I didn't make a sound. I didn't flinch. I didn't wince. I didn't whimper. I didn't even let my eye twitch or my lips move. I slowly let my head drop and took a slow, measured breath. Only when he came up and took that red-hot screwdriver and pressed it to the inside of my thigh, burning a hole through my wool suit slacks and branding me did I raise my chin up and let my vision blur. I just focused my mind, not on the smell of my skin cooking off and the way my raw flesh burned like a motherfucker as he kept pressing that hot screwdriver against my skin, but rather on my diaphragm, opening up my chest as I sucked in a breath.

I wasn't gonna give 'em the satisfaction of seeing me break. And I didn't.

You never let 'em see you waver. Once they see you waver, or hesitate, or take a single ragged breath that lets 'em think they can break you, they have you. You're done for. They'll take that vulnerability and use it against you. And so I don't let 'em see me sweat, or waver, or hesitate, or sad. Nobody—not my Dad, not Lt. Col. Al-Ammar of the Iraqi Republican Guard, not Melvin Gallagher, not even the crooked and dearly-departed Deputy Director of the FBI who tried to kill my partner—gets to see me that way.

Well, that's not exactly true.

There is one person, and only one, who I've let see me really vulnerable, who's seen me break down and cry, who knows the size of the wad of hurts I've got knotted up inside of me. She's the only one I'd ever let see me when one of those really nasty knots works its way loose. _Yep, _I smiled to myself. She's the only one.

_She's always been the only one, _I thought to myself as I watched her pull her Highlander up to the curb in front of the hospital entrance and stood up from my wheelchair.

"Mr. Booth," the nurse protested as Bones walked around the side of the car and gave me that look—the one where she tilts her head to the side and rolls her eyes and I can almost hear her groan and say, _"Ugh, you Alpha Male." _I hobbled towards the car and waved the nurse away. They gave me a walking boot for my ruptured now magically-repaired Achilles tendon, and as far as I was concerned, that meant I could walk. A part of me didn't want to give the murder suspect who did this to me—I'd been chasing the bastard when I hopped a chain link fence and came down wrong on my ankle—the satisfaction of knowing he'd hobbled me for one damn minute longer than necessary, even though the guy was sitting in federal lockup so, in a sense, I'd gotten the last laugh.

Bones sighed loudly and said, "I'll take him from here." She regarded the nurse with a little shrug as I draped my arm around her shoulders and leaned on her for support as I limped to the car. "You are incorrigible," she said to me.

I gave her a peck on the cheek before letting her help me up into the passenger seat. "Thanks, Bones," I said as she shut the door. I rolled the window down and waved at the nurse who was still standing there with the wheelchair.

I turned to my partner as she took her seat and shifted the Highlander into drive. "You can be such a pain in the ass sometimes, Booth," she sighed.

"You love it, though," I told her with a grin.

"Maybe," she said with another roll of her eyes as she pulled out of the George Washington University Hospital garage and out onto 23rd Street Northwest.

"Maybe," I mumbled, wincing a little as she hit the brakes hard to avoid the abruptly-stopping taxi in front of us. "Hey, uh, Bones?" I said to her. "Can we stop for a milkshake on the way home? I kinda want a milkshake." I gave her my best puppy-dog eyes and a little pout as I pleaded silently. "You know, 'cause I was really good putting up all the doctors and nurses and everything." I nodded encouragingly. "Please?"

She laughed. "You are incorrigible, aren't you?"

Not really sure what she meant, I took it as a compliment. "You know it, baby."

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**A/N:** _Take one coughing, sniffling sick day plus a little bit of angst which faded somewhat over the course of the day into something lighter, and this is what the muse burped out. It's kind of a "Portrait of the Alpha Male as a Young Man" sort of thing, you know—some Booth character history fill-in that I for one am always hungry for and endlessly disappointed we never get. Oh, and a little B&B at the end._

_So, what did you think of that? _

_Let me know what you thought of this little guy. (The story, I mean—I'm quite sure Booth would be pissed if the term "little" was ever used in referenced to him, or any *cough* part of him.)_

_Please take a moment to leave a review._

_Thanks for reading!_


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